Saturday, December 4, 2010
handmade yule
i hate commercial christmas. hate it. i hate it being all about money and stuff and being a failed psychic of other people's taste. i usually do some of my gifts handmade and most of the food for my yule party from scratch but this year i've decided all my gifts will be homemade. a bit of the food will be bought premade but most will be from-scratch indulgences. many of the recipients of those gifts read this blog so i wont detail them until afterwards, hopefully with pics, but suffice it to say this year it's about the time we spend together and the effort and care that went into a gift. take that, metrotown! and i'm not watching tv again until the boxing day ads are gone! so there!
gaaaaarlic knots
difficulty rating: bottle short of a six pack
been a while since i posted hasn't it? this is also turning into a mostly food blog but kinda boring since my camera is a piece of crap. oh well. this pic isn't *my* garlic knots, but they look just like them so good enough:
garlic knots, for the uninitiated, are garlic bread's sexy younger cousin. if done right they are tastier, prettier, and faster then the bread from scratch. i'm going to get so fucking fat because i can't stop making these and eating them all immediately:
turn on your oven to it's lowest setting
mix together
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 1/2 Tbs instant yeast
1 1/2 Tbs sugar
set aside, mix separately:
3 1/2 cups flour
1 Tbs garlic powder
1 Tbs salt
once your yeast mix starts bubbling, dump it into the four mixture along with:
1/4 cup oil (olive, canola, melted butter, whatever)
stir until a soft dough forms, then knead for a few min, adding a spoonful or two more flour if needed to keep it from being too sticky
cover the bowl with a clean towel (i like to wrap it under too since my bowl is plastic) and place in your warm (not hot) oven. turn the oven off and keep the door closed for 20-30 min
now your dough should be twice the size. punch it down and divide into two balls. place each ball on a big greased pan/cookie sheet and divide each ball into 16 even pieces. turn your oven onto the lowest setting again.
roll each piece quickly between your hands to make an 8 inch "rope" about 1/3" thick, then tie into a single knot. try to leave enough space in between so they wont be touching when they double in size again.
turn your oven back off and lay your towel over the rack. put your pans in to rise again.
once they're big and puffy, remove the towel and turn the heat up to 325 for about 20 min or until lightly golden brown. in the mean time heat in the microwave for two min:
1/2 cup butter (can sub half olive oil if desired)
1/2-1 tsp salt
1/2-1 tsp fresh pepper
1/2-1 tsp oregano (or dill or parsley)
4-6 cloves fresh minced garlic
and yes 2 min is way longer then needed to melt the butter. we're also trying to partially cook the garlic and get all the flavors into the fat.
once the knots are cooked, take them out, turn off the oven, spoon the garlic butter over them (being sure to get some garlic bits on each) and top each with a pinch of:
parmesan, preferably fresh but the powdered type will do
and put pans back in the (off) oven for 5 min to let the cheese melt and the butter soak in.
now try not to eat ALL of them in the next two hours wouldja?
been a while since i posted hasn't it? this is also turning into a mostly food blog but kinda boring since my camera is a piece of crap. oh well. this pic isn't *my* garlic knots, but they look just like them so good enough:
garlic knots, for the uninitiated, are garlic bread's sexy younger cousin. if done right they are tastier, prettier, and faster then the bread from scratch. i'm going to get so fucking fat because i can't stop making these and eating them all immediately:
turn on your oven to it's lowest setting
mix together
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 1/2 Tbs instant yeast
1 1/2 Tbs sugar
set aside, mix separately:
3 1/2 cups flour
1 Tbs garlic powder
1 Tbs salt
once your yeast mix starts bubbling, dump it into the four mixture along with:
1/4 cup oil (olive, canola, melted butter, whatever)
stir until a soft dough forms, then knead for a few min, adding a spoonful or two more flour if needed to keep it from being too sticky
cover the bowl with a clean towel (i like to wrap it under too since my bowl is plastic) and place in your warm (not hot) oven. turn the oven off and keep the door closed for 20-30 min
now your dough should be twice the size. punch it down and divide into two balls. place each ball on a big greased pan/cookie sheet and divide each ball into 16 even pieces. turn your oven onto the lowest setting again.
roll each piece quickly between your hands to make an 8 inch "rope" about 1/3" thick, then tie into a single knot. try to leave enough space in between so they wont be touching when they double in size again.
turn your oven back off and lay your towel over the rack. put your pans in to rise again.
once they're big and puffy, remove the towel and turn the heat up to 325 for about 20 min or until lightly golden brown. in the mean time heat in the microwave for two min:
1/2 cup butter (can sub half olive oil if desired)
1/2-1 tsp salt
1/2-1 tsp fresh pepper
1/2-1 tsp oregano (or dill or parsley)
4-6 cloves fresh minced garlic
and yes 2 min is way longer then needed to melt the butter. we're also trying to partially cook the garlic and get all the flavors into the fat.
once the knots are cooked, take them out, turn off the oven, spoon the garlic butter over them (being sure to get some garlic bits on each) and top each with a pinch of:
parmesan, preferably fresh but the powdered type will do
and put pans back in the (off) oven for 5 min to let the cheese melt and the butter soak in.
now try not to eat ALL of them in the next two hours wouldja?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
oh dear the cider
difficulty rating: pint
we started some hard apple cider as one of the wine experiments and since then i've done it a couple of times. it is by far the easiest booze i've made and it's very tasty. something like a cross between mead and beer. it only takes a month and i even got good results with no-name brand apple juice and brown sugar. the first time i got drunk on this i woke up the next day not hungover, still drunk. it's a bit harsh and beer-y at first sip but is mellow a the second sip and soon tastes like more, as in, i want more of that. you simply take a gallon of good apple juice from the green grocer (comes in a nice sterile glass jug which is now your carboy), pour out a little to make some space, add a cup and a half of sugar(white or brown or whatever), and a pkg of champagne yeast from the homebrewing store. shake the crap out of it, top up with the reserved juice to an inch and a half from the top if needed, then replace the lid with a balloon that you've poked a few holes in. leave it in the closet for 3 weeks, then siphon it into pop bottles (sterilized with bleach and soap, rinsed very well. they can take the carbonation, wine bottles can't) leaving the sediment at the bottom out, and add another cup of sugar. cap it and leave it for another week. ta dah! chill it before serving and go start another batch, you'll want more. i did a 4 gallon batch in a water cooler jug (sterilized) with no-name apple juice and brown sugar and it turned out just fine too. you can use one pkg of champagne yeast for up to 5 gallons of cider so the 4 gallon one cost me around $20 and gave me 8 2-liter bottles. pretty damn good i say! i haven't measured but i'd say the alcohol content ends up around 10%, certainly higher then beer but not quite as high as some wines.
we started some hard apple cider as one of the wine experiments and since then i've done it a couple of times. it is by far the easiest booze i've made and it's very tasty. something like a cross between mead and beer. it only takes a month and i even got good results with no-name brand apple juice and brown sugar. the first time i got drunk on this i woke up the next day not hungover, still drunk. it's a bit harsh and beer-y at first sip but is mellow a the second sip and soon tastes like more, as in, i want more of that. you simply take a gallon of good apple juice from the green grocer (comes in a nice sterile glass jug which is now your carboy), pour out a little to make some space, add a cup and a half of sugar(white or brown or whatever), and a pkg of champagne yeast from the homebrewing store. shake the crap out of it, top up with the reserved juice to an inch and a half from the top if needed, then replace the lid with a balloon that you've poked a few holes in. leave it in the closet for 3 weeks, then siphon it into pop bottles (sterilized with bleach and soap, rinsed very well. they can take the carbonation, wine bottles can't) leaving the sediment at the bottom out, and add another cup of sugar. cap it and leave it for another week. ta dah! chill it before serving and go start another batch, you'll want more. i did a 4 gallon batch in a water cooler jug (sterilized) with no-name apple juice and brown sugar and it turned out just fine too. you can use one pkg of champagne yeast for up to 5 gallons of cider so the 4 gallon one cost me around $20 and gave me 8 2-liter bottles. pretty damn good i say! i haven't measured but i'd say the alcohol content ends up around 10%, certainly higher then beer but not quite as high as some wines.
Friday, October 8, 2010
bwhaha goat cheese and sourdough!
difficulty rating: rolling in her grave
i love goat cheese. i love sourdough. i hate that they're both fairly expensive. nearly anything you make at home is better so why not try these too?
the goat cheese is stupidly simple. you just heat goat's milk to just boiling (stir constantly, watch carefully), remove from the heat and add vinegar to curdle, then drain (in cheesecloth or an old pillowslip) and add salt. i used 2L of milk to 1/4 cup white vinegar and a tsp or two of salt. this turned out a little dry (read: kinda rubbery?) so i'm going to stir in a little whipping cream i have leftover to add a bit of smoothness to it but it was still wonderful on the fresh bread with some red wine.
i've tried sourdough before but was never able to produce anything edible. this time i kept on the starter and fed it every day for three weeks till it was good and healthy. you can make your own with a cup of water and a cup of flour, stirred together in some kind of container that lives on your counter. to feed it you dump out half (or use half) and add about a half a cup more water and flour. i never bother measuring anymore. it lives in a jar. i'm calling him jeremy. he's my kitchen pet. all the recipes i've tried before led to bread that didn't rise or didn't taste like anything or gave me a nasty stomach ache. apparently there's some tricks to this:
1)give up on the measuring. you shouldn't be doing this unless you already know how to make bread and if you do know then you are perfectly capable of tossing in "that much" until the dough looks and feels right
2)be patient! it takes at least 3 hours for even the most active starter to rise your dough and the longer it rises the better the flavor will be. you can even put it in the fridge overnight to do it's second rise and then finish it in a warm environment the next day
3)give it a nice warm place to grow. like your oven that you turned on to the lowest setting for 5 min with a pot holder under the container so it doesn't get too hot. heat kills yeast, cold makes it dormant. for it to make bread you want it in a warm-sauna or just-above-body-temp environment.
4)don't tear into it immediately out of the oven! the wild yeasts are still active and will make you sick. give it a good 30-45 min to cool down first. it will still be warm, don't worry.
the "recipe" i did was pour 50-75% of my active starter into a bowl, added a bit of warm water (maybe half a cup?) a good splash or two of oil, half a palmful of salt, a palmful of sugar (makes yeast grow faster), and stirred it up, than added flour and stirred and kneaded until i had a solid, elastic, slightly sticky dough. i let it rise in a greased bowl for 3 or 4 hours, then shaped the loaf and put it in the fridge overnight (i don't think this made much of a difference to be honest), next morning it hadn't risen much so i put it back in the warm oven for a few more hours, till it was good and rounded over the lip of my loaf pan, then i turned the oven up to 375 for 35 min. it didn't sound hollow when i tapped it but it was getting pretty brown so i turned the heat down to 325 and baked for another 10 min, then let cool for about an hour. this turned out lovely but, like many breads made with basically just flour and water, it lacked richness. next time i'm going to add warm milk instead of water and maybe an egg and butter instead of oil to give it a nicer rich quality, kinda like my favorite buttery buns recipe but with a sourdough flavor. there's lots of ways to do this so don't let anyone tell you that it must be perfectly precise. sourdough takes time and effort and experience but it is satisfying and healthy. anyone who knows baking will tell you that off-book homemade sourdough is fucking hardcore.
i also have two different sour cream experiments a-brewing so i'll let you know what works best. and did i mention that the homebrewed hard apple cider turned out AMAZING? i have a 4 gallon batch brewing for samhain but i'm using different juice and sugar so we'll we how it differs. if it's not as good and/or i can't get the simple mead to cooperate in time i'll be making a 4 gallon batch with the organic apple juice and regular sugar to be drunk at yule
i love goat cheese. i love sourdough. i hate that they're both fairly expensive. nearly anything you make at home is better so why not try these too?
the goat cheese is stupidly simple. you just heat goat's milk to just boiling (stir constantly, watch carefully), remove from the heat and add vinegar to curdle, then drain (in cheesecloth or an old pillowslip) and add salt. i used 2L of milk to 1/4 cup white vinegar and a tsp or two of salt. this turned out a little dry (read: kinda rubbery?) so i'm going to stir in a little whipping cream i have leftover to add a bit of smoothness to it but it was still wonderful on the fresh bread with some red wine.
i've tried sourdough before but was never able to produce anything edible. this time i kept on the starter and fed it every day for three weeks till it was good and healthy. you can make your own with a cup of water and a cup of flour, stirred together in some kind of container that lives on your counter. to feed it you dump out half (or use half) and add about a half a cup more water and flour. i never bother measuring anymore. it lives in a jar. i'm calling him jeremy. he's my kitchen pet. all the recipes i've tried before led to bread that didn't rise or didn't taste like anything or gave me a nasty stomach ache. apparently there's some tricks to this:
1)give up on the measuring. you shouldn't be doing this unless you already know how to make bread and if you do know then you are perfectly capable of tossing in "that much" until the dough looks and feels right
2)be patient! it takes at least 3 hours for even the most active starter to rise your dough and the longer it rises the better the flavor will be. you can even put it in the fridge overnight to do it's second rise and then finish it in a warm environment the next day
3)give it a nice warm place to grow. like your oven that you turned on to the lowest setting for 5 min with a pot holder under the container so it doesn't get too hot. heat kills yeast, cold makes it dormant. for it to make bread you want it in a warm-sauna or just-above-body-temp environment.
4)don't tear into it immediately out of the oven! the wild yeasts are still active and will make you sick. give it a good 30-45 min to cool down first. it will still be warm, don't worry.
the "recipe" i did was pour 50-75% of my active starter into a bowl, added a bit of warm water (maybe half a cup?) a good splash or two of oil, half a palmful of salt, a palmful of sugar (makes yeast grow faster), and stirred it up, than added flour and stirred and kneaded until i had a solid, elastic, slightly sticky dough. i let it rise in a greased bowl for 3 or 4 hours, then shaped the loaf and put it in the fridge overnight (i don't think this made much of a difference to be honest), next morning it hadn't risen much so i put it back in the warm oven for a few more hours, till it was good and rounded over the lip of my loaf pan, then i turned the oven up to 375 for 35 min. it didn't sound hollow when i tapped it but it was getting pretty brown so i turned the heat down to 325 and baked for another 10 min, then let cool for about an hour. this turned out lovely but, like many breads made with basically just flour and water, it lacked richness. next time i'm going to add warm milk instead of water and maybe an egg and butter instead of oil to give it a nicer rich quality, kinda like my favorite buttery buns recipe but with a sourdough flavor. there's lots of ways to do this so don't let anyone tell you that it must be perfectly precise. sourdough takes time and effort and experience but it is satisfying and healthy. anyone who knows baking will tell you that off-book homemade sourdough is fucking hardcore.
i also have two different sour cream experiments a-brewing so i'll let you know what works best. and did i mention that the homebrewed hard apple cider turned out AMAZING? i have a 4 gallon batch brewing for samhain but i'm using different juice and sugar so we'll we how it differs. if it's not as good and/or i can't get the simple mead to cooperate in time i'll be making a 4 gallon batch with the organic apple juice and regular sugar to be drunk at yule
Monday, September 27, 2010
advetures in cheese and butter
as part of my intrepid homesteading, i want to learn to make cheese. i've made ricotta before and that's pretty idiot proof but it's not *real* cheese. so this time around i was trying to make mozzarella and while i was at it, butter.
the butter is also idiot proof: take whipping cream, whip it way past the normal point until the fat separates from the milk, squeeze the liquid out (rinse in cold water to get the last of it), and add a bit of salt. fantastic! it goes on the fresh banana bread and is wonderful.
the mozza i was making was somewhat hampered by the fact that i can only get junket-brand rennet here and that's not really meant for cheese making, it's meant for custards and things. it is rennet, just rather weak. knowing this, i added quite a bit more then usual and let it set a lot longer then normal. i still ended up with a weak and sickly separation between curds and whey but i managed to drain it. unfortunately, in the heat-and-stretch stage, it became fairly apparent that i could not extract enough whey from the curds to make it a solid and it wasn't melting to enable stretching. all this tells me that (i'm pretty sure) FOREMOST IS ULTRA PASTEURIZING THEIR MILK AND NOT LABELING IT AS SUCH! this severely annoys me, not only because i now have ricotta instead of mozza, but because ultra pasteurizing milk not only damages the proteins, it also makes it significantly less healthy! it would be one thing if it said on it that they'd super heated it to the extent that NOTHING could ever possibly live in it from now till the twelfth of never. that would be ok, i would have been informed and would have chosen a non-dead milk because i know better then to try to make cheese with that crap and i also know that it's sad and pathetic compared to normal pasteurized or raw milk. i now have the choice between trying dairyland or lucurne (big companies, probably same story), attempting reconstituting powdered milk, or seeing if any of my farmers' markets carry real milk. *sigh*. i was really looking forward to the mozza too. i bought some beautiful kalamata olives and i had rosemary trisuits and the first fresh tomato of my garden and wine to make a nice little platter. instead i had leftovers. *sniff*. my only consolation is that i can make very good stuffed shells with the ricotta.
update: I DID IT! it started out like the first batch and i really thought lucurne ultra pasteurized as well so i upped the temp to turn it into ricotta and it started solidifying and getting all melty and stringy just like it's supposed to! finished it off and had some with garden tomatoes and basil, so fantastic and deeply satisfying. i even got a bit of ricotta out of the whey leftover. i probably would have gotten more if i'd followed all the directions despite the not-normal-looking outcome. this was certainly easy enough to make again so more experiments will follow. eventually i'm going to fashion a cheese press and take on something more ambitious like parmesan.
the butter is also idiot proof: take whipping cream, whip it way past the normal point until the fat separates from the milk, squeeze the liquid out (rinse in cold water to get the last of it), and add a bit of salt. fantastic! it goes on the fresh banana bread and is wonderful.
the mozza i was making was somewhat hampered by the fact that i can only get junket-brand rennet here and that's not really meant for cheese making, it's meant for custards and things. it is rennet, just rather weak. knowing this, i added quite a bit more then usual and let it set a lot longer then normal. i still ended up with a weak and sickly separation between curds and whey but i managed to drain it. unfortunately, in the heat-and-stretch stage, it became fairly apparent that i could not extract enough whey from the curds to make it a solid and it wasn't melting to enable stretching. all this tells me that (i'm pretty sure) FOREMOST IS ULTRA PASTEURIZING THEIR MILK AND NOT LABELING IT AS SUCH! this severely annoys me, not only because i now have ricotta instead of mozza, but because ultra pasteurizing milk not only damages the proteins, it also makes it significantly less healthy! it would be one thing if it said on it that they'd super heated it to the extent that NOTHING could ever possibly live in it from now till the twelfth of never. that would be ok, i would have been informed and would have chosen a non-dead milk because i know better then to try to make cheese with that crap and i also know that it's sad and pathetic compared to normal pasteurized or raw milk. i now have the choice between trying dairyland or lucurne (big companies, probably same story), attempting reconstituting powdered milk, or seeing if any of my farmers' markets carry real milk. *sigh*. i was really looking forward to the mozza too. i bought some beautiful kalamata olives and i had rosemary trisuits and the first fresh tomato of my garden and wine to make a nice little platter. instead i had leftovers. *sniff*. my only consolation is that i can make very good stuffed shells with the ricotta.
update: I DID IT! it started out like the first batch and i really thought lucurne ultra pasteurized as well so i upped the temp to turn it into ricotta and it started solidifying and getting all melty and stringy just like it's supposed to! finished it off and had some with garden tomatoes and basil, so fantastic and deeply satisfying. i even got a bit of ricotta out of the whey leftover. i probably would have gotten more if i'd followed all the directions despite the not-normal-looking outcome. this was certainly easy enough to make again so more experiments will follow. eventually i'm going to fashion a cheese press and take on something more ambitious like parmesan.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
B12 update
so it really is making a difference! even when my life truly is sucking (hate my job, hate my apartment, have no life) i'm finding it much easier to stop the downward thought spirals and keep some perspective so i can do something about it. i suggested it to a co-worker who is also suffering from really bad depression and he's noticed a difference too (and he's not even a vegetarian, maybe we're onto something here!). i can't say i'm no longer depressed, but it now feels much more in control and circumstantial then all-pervading and unavoidable. it's opened an inch or two of space for daylight in my brain and for now that's all i ask. if you're having similar issues i highly recommend trying it out for a couple of weeks and let us all know if it works. our diets in north america tend to be deficient in many vitamins these days so it wouldn't surprise me at all if improving our nutrition overall would also very much help the increasing mental health issues as well as physical ones
name change update
the paperwork is officially in! i should have my certificate in a few weeks and then i just have to replace all my ID *groan*. it's annoying how people only take you seriously when you get a $250 piece of paper from the government, as if that somehow changes who we really are. course i find myself more adamantly correcting people and getting more annoyed with those who know better and use my old name anyways so it's partially my fault. i imagine most people who do this feel more justified insisting on their choice once it's "official". i've been introducing myself as my new name since my religious ceremony in march and nothing gets you used to it like answering the phone "thank you for calling, my name is..." 40 times a day. it's felt like mine since then and i actually bitched out my boss for trying to tell me i couldn't sign emails with my new name until the legal change is done and they change my email address, claiming it would cause confusion. i can't see how the change can possibly NOT cause some confusion. i believe my comment was "well that's a crappy reason to not respect someone's life choices" accompanied by a nasty glare and the paperwork in a week later despite not being able to find my birth certificate. it will all be easier with that one stupid piece of paper. have i mentioned lately that i hate the government and our society? of course i hate everything to do with my boss and workplace and company and field but that's besides the point. we all know i pray every day for the building to burn to the ground.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)